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August 31, 2012

We note, with sadness, the passing of Semiotext(e) author,
Shulamith Firestone, who passed away of natural causes, though at a date that
has not yet been determined. Firestone was a major voice in the second wave of
the feminist movement in the United States that also included such figures as
Germaine Greer and Kate Millet; her 1970 book, The Dialectic of Sex, offered a brilliant and radical analysis of
biological reproduction and the role of women in society that remains as
relevant today as it had been over forty years ago when it first came out
(particularly with the rekindled political debates over reproductive rights
that have arisen over the last year).

Her only other book, Airless
Spaces, was a more personal account of lives experienced in the margins and
ensnared by the institutions of psychiatry and medication. The New York Timesconcludes its obituary with an extract from this
collection of stories: a passage that communicates the devastating personal
struggles Firestone had to undergo in her own life. We take comfort in her
having left us with an intellectual legacy that remains as lucid and trenchant
as ever.

If you're a regular reader of this PressLog - and we know you are - you'll of course know that it's been seven years since we created this magnificent fount of information to keep you abreast of the comings and goings of MIT Press books and authors. And around each birthday we stop for a minute to take stock of the year just past. (OK, we missed last year, but we were doingprettywelluntilthen.)

With the regularity of the stages that accompany the raising of a child, the PressLog has always found something dark and edgy to complain about in these annual roundups. Like Glenn Beck. Or the Gulf oil spill. Or cyberbulling. To paraphrase a great comedienne, it was always something.

But this year, the PressLog seems to have an unusually sunny disposition. Perhaps it's because seven-year-olds are independent, confident in their ability to meet life's challenges. Whatever, the reason, it was a good year for the PressLog, full of swimming pools, spacesuits, and, as always, games. And the Games - the Olympics, that is. And, uh, diseases, but that's another story.

There was a (literally) beautiful new series, Monday Eye Candy, meant to show off the visual splendor of many of our books. And while PressLog makes it a point never to veer into politics, it was glad to see the upholding of the Affordable Care Act, foreseeing a lifetime full of skinned knees and scraped elbows.

August 30, 2012

The athlete Oscar
Pistorius, by running in the Olympic 400 meter semi-final on prosthetic legs,
has blurred the boundaries between the Olympics and Paralympics.

In
Design Meets Disability, Graham Pullin advocates
blurring the boundaries between assistive technology and design in general,
allowing the worlds of disability and design to influence and even inspire each
other. If eyeglasses have been
transformed from medical necessity to fashion accessory, why can’t designers do
the same for hearing aids and prosthetic limbs?

One of the people Pullin
interviewed for the book was Aimee Mullins, another athlete who has competed on
the Össur carbon fiber blades that Pistorius wears. Aimee is also an actor, an activist and a
model, who has modeled for Alexander McQueen. She takes a broader, cultural perspective:

"[Mullins] thinks that fashion designers and jewelry designers
should be involved in design for disability as a matter of course.“Discreet?” she sniggers. “I want off-the-chart glamorous!” For her,
modern luxury is less about a desire for perfection as a desire for options.
Her wardrobe is made up not only of different clothes that can make her feel a
different way but also different legs: there are her carbon fiber running legs,
various silicone cosmetic prostheses, and a pair of intricately hand-carved
wooden legs."

Aimee Mullins's carved wooden legs

“I’m thinking about what I’m going to wear them with: jeans and
motorcycle boots, or my Azzedine Alaïa dress if I want to feel amazing.” Her
legs too can make her feel amazing in different ways: a pair of silicone legs
that are several inches longer than her own legs would be, make her (even)
taller and more elegant on the catwalk, while her eerie glass legs have an
element of magical realism... From the perspective of the health insurance
companies, Mullins says that “every single pair of my legs are considered
unnecessary.” But an element of fantasy among the practicalities of everyday
life is important to her. Even, as she wryly puts it, to express a certain
shallowness."

Informed and inspired by
the ideas of disabled people and designers, Design
Meets Disability ends with a series of speculations, pairing designers with
disability-related briefs. One such is a conversation with the designer Martin
Bone about prosthetic legs. Pullin
writes:

"We become intrigued by the idea of relinquishing visual imitation
without abandoning a reference to the feel of the human body. This implies
abstraction: materials that may not feel exactly like skin but that have some
of its qualities, or might be pleasant to touch in their own right. Bone is
inspired by the aesthetic relationship between the structure and cover of a
prosthesis, inspired to play with the contrast between hard and soft, skeleton
and tissue.

Martin Bone's
sketches for new combinations of materials in prosthetic legs

The year is 1579. Having kept the manuscript in a drawer for
twenty years, Laurent Joubert publishes his Treatise
on Laughter. His goal: “leave nothing on the unusual topic unsounded.” The
treatise is an early modern encyclopedia of laughing matters…

What is laughter? Joubert’s catalog of definitions returns
us to a materialism long forgotten today. Laughter is “a trembling and a
noise”; “a sound producing movement”; “a movement which stretches the muscles
of the face”; “the dilating of the parts of the mouth and of the face.” In
laughter, “the chest shakes, the lungs produce an interrupted sound, the mouth
opens, and the lips draw back.” To the question: What does laughter look like?
Joubert gives a complex answer:

Everybody
sees clearly that in laughter the face is moving, the mouth widens, the eyes
sparkle andtear, the cheeks redden, the breast heaves, the voice becomes
interrupted; and when it goes on for a long time the veins in the throat become
enlarged, the arms shake, and the legs dance about, the belly pulls in and
feels considerable pain; we cough, perspire, piss, and besmirch ourselves by
dint of laughing, and sometimes we even faint away because of it. This need not
be proven.

Laughter is a convulsion of the face. It involves a specific
constellation of functions of the face: the mouth, the eyes, the cheeks, the
voice. When laughter becomes a question not of a single burst but a series of
bursts (“when it goes on for a long time”), it also involves the rest of the
body—arms, legs, belly, breast, veins in the throat. The body laughs. Extreme
physiological changes might occur, for one can feel pain, cough, perspire,
piss, besmirch oneself, faint. The body in laughter is a convulsive assemblage, whose parts shake and dance about,
refusing to form a totality. The laughing face is itself bursting, its mouth
suddenly stretched, its eyes sparking, color splashing its cheeks with shades
of red.

Joubert further complicates the scene of laughter:

Some
men, when they laugh, sound like geese hissing, others like grumbling goslings;
some recall the sigh of woodland pigeons, or doves in their widowhood; others
the hoot-owl; one an Indian rooster, another a peacock; others give out a peep-peep,
like chicks; for others it is like hose neighing, or an ass heehawing, or a dog
that yaps or is chocking, some people call to mind the sound of dry-axled carts, others, gravel in a pail, others yet a boiling pot of cabbage; and some
have still another resonance, aside from the look on their face and the
grimacing, so variedly diverse that nothing parallels it.

Not only is laughter distorting the face into a grimace and
shaking the body convulsively, but it also produces a certain, hard-to-define,
sound. Joubert describes laughter’s sound onomatopoeically; laughter sounds
“like” geese hissing, horses neighing, the peep-peep of chicks, or the
hee-hawing of asses. Even when laughter sounds like a pot of boiling cabbage or
gravel in a pail, the description speaks to the ear of Joubert’s reader; one is
challenged to hear these sounds.

August 20, 2012

Today's eye candy is from Markus Krajewski's Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929. The book discusses why the card catalog--a “paper machine” with rearrangeable elements--can be regarded as a precursor of the computer. It contains 24 figures and 1 table (click on each image to enlarge).

The classification system of the Pandectae in Gessner 1549, following a tree structure. (From Gessner 1549, page after the cover)

As the slow food movement meets fast food nation and eating locally collides with on-demand arugula, our food habits are shifting: writers and artists examine and imagine these changes, from the idea of a farm in a skyscraper to a map of fruit that falls on public property, from the genealogy of an organic bento box to a tale of chop suey and egg rolls.

August 14, 2012

We take sad note of the passing, earlier this month, of Elizabeth M. Stanton, better known to some of us as Betty Stanton, at the age of 90. Along with her husband Harry, Betty was instrumental in the Press's entrance into the then-nascent field of cognitive science, when we brought Harry and Betty aboard and acquired their small publishing house, Bradford Books, making it an imprint of ours. The initial release in this partnership was Daniel Dennett's Brainstorms, still in print more than 30 years later. Under the Stantons' guardianship, the Bradford imprint would go on the work of virtually all major scholars in cognitive science, as Dennett told us recently:

Over the first dozen years of its existence it published most of the important books by leaders in the field: Pinker, Jackendoff, Levelt, McClelland and Rumelhart, Shepard, Pylyshyn, Premack, Carey, Gazzaniga, Grossberg, Braitenberg, Fauconnier, Simon and Ericson, Holland, Holyoak, Thagard, Arbib, Hinton, Gallistel ... and essentially all the important books in philosophy of cognitive science--Dretske, Fodor, Block, Millikan, Stich, Patricia and Paul Churchland, Barwise and Perry, Harman, Haugeland, Flanagan, Lycan, Stalnaker, Putnam, Goldman, Clark, Lloyd, and myself. Who of any importance wasn’t a Bradford author in those years?

A memorial service for Betty Stanton will be held on August 18 in Ipswich, MA. She will be missed.

August 10, 2012

How did Britain go from being reluctant Olympic hosts to full-fledged embracers of the Games and what they say about the country? Mark Earls, coauthor of I'll Have What She's Having: Mapping Social Behavior, explains it all for you. His reflections follow - thanks, Mark!

We Brits are a skeptical bunch. The difference between our North American cousins and us was once explained to me by a colleague thus: “We Americans,” she asserted, Manhattanite to her toes, “we still believe s*** – sometimes too easily, sometimes foolishly, but sometimes for the better. You Brits always seem to be wondering whether someone is ‘having you on,’ ‘pulling your leg,’ or ‘winding you up.’”

So it’s curious to watch how – in the space of a matter of weeks – we have shifted from a nation uneasy with the huge expenditure of hosting the Olympics, the enormous expectations and all the brouhaha that goes with it – a nation of doubters, naysayers, and grumblers, if you like – to one which seems to have decided to jolly well enjoy it!

Of course, it has helped that our British athletes have done so well, thanks to well-planned long-term development in selected sports (largely those involving sitting down, it must be said, and somehow a Briton has worked out how to win a singles final at Wimbledon); and, of course, that (as yet) nothing much has gone wrong with the organization (apart from losing a couple of coaches early on).

It’s clear that this shift is not a result of each of the 60 million British citizens weighing the pros and cons of the Games independently of those around them and – on balance – deciding that the Games are not nearly such a bad thing as we’d previously thought. Or even that individuals were persuaded merely by their own experience. (“Now that I’ve tried the Games, I realize what I’ve been missing.”) Indeed, most of us have had no direct experience of the Olympic facilities at all.

No, it’s not people making their own minds up independently, but social learning, copying: the “I’ll have what she’s having” effect, as we call it inour book of the same name. Copying is what’s bringing about this shift in opinion: we are all responding to the excitement of those around us, to their change of mind, to what we think of their experiences.

Curiously for a sporting event, the sport itself is less important than the social interaction around it. Let’s be honest: before these games how many of us actually knew anything about the sports we’re cheering for? How many of us had any idea what a “keirin” (the discipline that brought cyclist Sir Chris Hoy his record six gold medals) is? The sport – supposedly the meat of the Olympic sandwich – has become what American blogger, Hugh Macleod, calls a “social object” (after Malinowksi’s Kula studies):

The Social Object, in a nutshell, is the reason two people are talking to each other, as opposed to talking to somebody else. Human beings are social animals. We like to socialize. But if you think about it, there needs to be a reason for it to happen in the first place. That reason, that ‘node’ in the social network, is what we call the Social Object.

Big sporting events are ideal for providing this kind of platform: as an arena for “I’ll Have What She’s Having,” gathering people together in physical spaces which allow us to sense the reactions of those around us. And this can lead to good things emerging and spreading around the world (the “Ola” or “Mexican Wave” emerged globally at the 1986 FIFA World Cup in Mexico as people saw each other participating in this simple and transitory game). For much the same reason, sporting events have also been the focus of terrorist campaigns – Munich being the worst example in my memory.

But this shift in attitude from skeptic to enthusiast didn’t happen overnight; indeed, until recently it all looked rather dismal. Not only did we start off feeling negative and distrusting, but we’ve had a long build-up, and our negative opinions have had plenty of time to firm up (thanks to ticketing scandals, budget overruns, transport disruption, etc.). So how have the organisers overcome this negative mindset?

The stroke of genius on the part of the organizers lies in really embracing the Torch Relay around these “isles of wonder”: over 70 days and several thousand miles, the inhabitants of all kinds of towns, villages, and communities were gathered together to watch locally selected individuals pass the torch along the line. A pre-echo of the larger Games experience and a primer, street-by-street, for the “I’ll Have What She’s Having” effect to take place and for our enthusiasm to spread? Maybe.

(Of course, the cynic in me wants to point out that the torch relay is neither an ancient tradition nor a modern coinage: Carl Diem (d. 1962), the architect of the 1936 Berlin Games, introduced this innovation. Now there’s an interesting source to copy…)

And, lest we forget, movie director Danny Boyle’s extraordinary “bonkers” opening ceremony spectacle which – like a good social object always does – lit up the conversations brighter than any literal flame could.

In celebration of Happiness Happens Month, we will feature a few of our books that are relevant to the meanings and manifestations of happiness. In Happiness: A Revolution in Economics, Bruno Frey discusses the potential of happiness research (the quantification of well-being) to answer important questions that standard economics methods are unable to analyze. Here is an excerpt from Happiness that reveals the most common methods that happiness researchers use to measure individual well-being.

Asking People: Global Evaluations of Individual life Satisfaction

This approach seeks to capture happiness by asking a representative sample of individuals about their overall satisfaction with their lives…Nearly all of the empirical work so far undertaken in economic happiness research has been based on representative, large-scale sampling of individuals’ global evaluations of their life satisfaction.

Experience Sampling Method (ESM)

This approach collects information on individuals’ experiences in real time in their natural environments (Csikszentmihalyi and Hunter 2003; Scollon, Kim-Prieto, and Diener 2003). It is designed to deal with some of the shortcomings of global satisfaction surveys.

A representative selection of individuals are supplied with a beeper or a hand-held computer and are asked at random times to give quick answers to a battery of questions with regard to positive and negative affects. Respondents are also asked to state the intensity of their feelings. This electronic diary seeks to practically apply Edgeworth’s (1881) idea of measuring utility with a “hedonimeter” that captures immediate experience. Happiness can then be calculated by the aggregation of these instantaneous statements of affect.

Day Reconstruction Method (DRM)

This method collects data describing the experience a person has on a particular day through a systematic reconstruction undertaken the following day (Kahneman et al.2004b). It relies on “time budgets” to capture how much time individuals spend in a particular activity. It is a reasonable approximation to experience sampling.

The U-Index

…The U-Index is defined as the fraction of time per day that an individual spends in an unpleasant state. An episode is unpleasant if the most intense feeling the individual experiences in that episode is a negative one. The U-Index relies on the observation that the dominant emotional state of most people most of the time is positive. Hence, any episode during which a negative feeling occurs is a significant occurrence.

Brain Imaging

A quite different measuring approach to approximate utility in a quantitative way consists in scanning individuals’ brain activities. It relies on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which tracks blood flow in the brain using changes in magnetic properties due to blood oxygenation (Camerer, Loewenstein, and Prelec 2005; Zak 2004; Fehr, Fischbacher, and Kosfeld 2005).